I’m sure Erika Kirk is as aware as any of us that it was darkly funny when she slipped up, while speaking at a big gathering of her organization Turning Point USA this past weekend at the end of a terrible year, and said of her fellow activists, “Despite the devastating loss of Charlie Kirk, my incredible husband, at UVU, Caleb has persisted with the same grift, excuse me, grit…”
It’s not some big gotcha that reveals all or debunks all right-wing economic thinking, but for a political—or entertainment—organization of almost any stripe in the media-filtered 21st century, it was at least a little reminder that the question of whether any of what you’re doing is productive activity is always lurking in the subconscious. It’s hard to quantify political gains, after all. We could all be building bridges or raising crops instead. In a world without government, where no one felt compelled to fend off the enemy faction 24/7, we probably would be.
Contrary to the amnesiac belief, common among the young, that the world learned irony and skepticism about big institutions like government and religion only in the 21st century, the joke religious group the Church of the Sub-Genius did a nice job, particularly back in the 1980s, of capturing the nascent hucksterism in most large-scale institutions dependent on drumming up a crowd, politics very much included. I thought then, and still do, that intelligent skepticism inevitably has something like a politically libertarian outcome.
One Sub-Genius diagram of how the world works showed a right-winger demanding your obedience and tax dollars on one side of the room, a left-winger demanding your obedience and tax dollars on the other side of the room, and an intellectually superior member of the Church of the Sub-Genius quietly sneaking up behind them and picking both their pockets. That, not someone like Mamdani winning an election, is real subversive optimism (with its roots in hippie performance art in this case and, before that, in the scornful chaos of century-ago Dadaism).
That sort of skepticism goes deeper than just opposing the fad or political cause of the moment and, done right, makes one wary of almost every effort to persuade you or shape the culture. And the Sub-Genius approach keeps on giving. I only recently noticed that the fictional Sub-Genius leader, grinning and pipe-smoking J.R. “BOB” Dobbs, is surely based on mid-century pop music/film icon and creepy dad Bing Crosby as seen on the cover of his immensely popular album Bing Crosby: The Voice of Christmas. In a mere decade as a youth, I went from frequent Bing absorption (every Christmas morning on my parents’ stereo) to frequent BOB absorption, and I regret neither phase.
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I vividly and fondly remember attending a Sub-Genius “devival” (as opposed to religious revival) in Manhattan and hearing one of the speakers promise the crowd that “compared to the pleasures we Sub-Genius will know on X-Day aboard the Pleasure Craft of the Alien Sex Goddesses, even pure slack is no better than a shit helmet with a padlock chin-strap!” Hearty amens followed from the crowd, and one need not hate Bing Crosby to shout along with them.
Lack of irony, or even just a seeming lack of irony, usually generates its own sarcastic counterweight, and the joke may outlast the dead-serious original message. Though it was born in Texas and often grudgingly beloved by right-wing conspiracy theorist types (there being a thin line between Alex Jones’ broadcasts and things like the Talking Heads movie True Stories), the Church of the Sub-Genius leaves an indirect echo in such far-off places as Portlandia.
On that 2010s show—which proved there are liberal, gentle ways of mocking the left in addition to the abrasive, right-wing ways—it was perfect and not wholly coincidental that the goofy, mildly delusional mayor was played by a grinning Kyle MacLachlan, in exactly the kind of squeaky-clean-to-the-point-of-insanity role that 1950s-loving David Lynch no doubt had in mind when he decided to cast MacLachlan as FBI agent Dale Cooper on Twin Peaks two decades earlier, eventually depicting Cooper being possessed by an evil spirit not-coincidentally named “BOB.”
The spirit of the 1990s, as they sang on the first episode of Portlandia, is alive in Portland, and that spirit may sometimes be evil. Recognizing it may help you extract the good stuff from the bad, with any luck finding yourself in a more nuanced position than you would if you were grim-facedly choosing in an all-in fashion between clashing Antifa and I.C.E. warrior factions in the Portland of the 2020s, convinced one side is kind and the other must be eradicated (whether by death or deportation).
If I can’t reasonably hope for peace on Earth this season, I can at least hope others’ hopes will lean more toward humor than toward harm. Despite the occasional hucksterism and violence, the Christian conservatives and the New Age leftists alike, at their best, are trying to foster a more pleasant world in the end. If it isn’t permanently out of style, maybe everyone should focus on being pleasant right now, lest the future be an I.C.E. agent’s boot stepping on a human face, or a brick smashing a Starbucks window, forever.
—Todd Seavey is the author of Libertarianism for Beginners and is on X at @ToddSeavey